The Morphology and Syntax of Topic and Focus

Minimalist inquiries in the Quechua periphery

Liliana Sánchez
Rutgers University
This book presents an innovative analysis that relates informational structure, syntax and morphology in Quechua. It provides a minimalist account of the relationship between focus, topic, evidentiality and other left-peripheral features and sentence-internal constituents marked with suffixes that have been previously considered of a pragmatic nature. Intervention effects show that these relationships are also of a syntactic nature. The analysis is extended to morphological markers that appear on polarity sensitive items and wh-words. The book also provides a brief overview of the main characteristics of Quechua syntax as well as additional bibliographical information.
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 169]  2010.  xiii, 242 pp.
Publishing status: Available
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ISBN 9789027255525 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
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ISBN 9789027287526 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
xi–xii
Abbreviations
xiii–xiv
Chapter 1. Introduction: Peripheral domains and agreement in Southern Quechua
1–8
Chapter 2. An overview of Southern Quechua morphology and syntax
9–28
Chapter 3. Morphology, syntax, and informational structure in Quechua
29–52
Chapter 4. Agree, morphological syncretism, and peripheral constituents
53–98
Chapter 5. Clausal analyses and the left and right peripheries of DPs
99–132
Chapter 6. The limits of agree in the left-periphery: wh-words, polarity items, and intervention effects
133–152
Chapter 7. The limits of syncretism: wh-movement
153–174
Chapter 8. The left and the right periphery in narrative discourse
175–228
Chapter 9. Concluding remarks
229–240
Index
241–242

Quotes

“It is an exciting prospect that now pragmatic features of the syntax and morphology of Quechua, a language family so far mostly studied in terms of its historical roots and formal properties, are coming to the fore. Liliana Sánchez, who pairs formal analytic skills with a deep knowledge of the language family, is the ideal person to undertake this. I am sure the book will be a source of inspiration for comparative linguists but also for people working in Andean language studies in a wider sense, including language processing and acquisition, bilingualism and sociolinguistics.”
Pieter Muysken, Radboud University Nijmegen
“Liliana Sanchez’s book, on the morphology and syntax of focus and topic in Quechua, presents an analysis of a wealth of fascinating data, which provides deep insight on how discourse-based notions (such as topic, focus, and evidentiality) are grammaticalized in natural language, and on how focus interacts with focus-sensitive operators such as Question-makers and Negation. This book should be of interest to scholars working on the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and comparative grammar.”
María Luisa Zubizarreta, University of Southern California

Subjects

Benjamins Subject classification

BIC Subject

CFK: Grammar, syntax

BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2010036642
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